By: BS Murthy

The attractions Roopa experienced and the fantasies she entertained as a teen shaped a male imagery that ensconced her subconscious. Insensibly, confident carriage came to be associated with the image of maleness in her mind-set. Her acute consciousness of masculinity only increased her vulnerability to it, making her womanliness crave for the maleness for its gratification. However, as her father was constrained to help her in becoming a doctor, she opts to marry, hopin...

That winter night in the mid-seventies, the Janata Express was racing rhythmically on its tracks towards the coast of Andhra Pradesh. As its headlight pierced the darkness of the fertile plains, the driver honked the horn as though to awake the sleepy environs to the spectacle of the speeding train. On that, in the S-3, were the Ramaiahs with their nine year-old daughter Roopa.
Earlier, from Ramavaram, it was in the nick of time that Ramaiah took Janaki to Vellore for ...

By: Sean Fraser

Hookland is the ninth of 17 chapters published in serial form wherein Zoë has gone to the county of Hookland in England.

Interlude: France, 1913 — The Melancholy influent had passed and those who would set intrigues from Orbis paradisiacus were silenced; the arrangements of Change originating in 1871 were concluded by those of Orbis limbus; and, so it was that Life continued as before in Praesentis vagus as Humanity waxed obsolescent by Man’s contrived magnificence and mores.

By: Sean Fraser

Lyon is the seventh of 17 chapters published in serial form. It is here dénoûments are made of the plots ushering cataclysmic Change.

Entr’acte: France, 1913 — Les Daemons æternels in this play shall perform as they have for centuries done; and, these acts, in which they are seen in this Modern Age, that may have been written in custom-houses of Lunacy when in other times were written in athenæums sublimis ab undaes, shall succor those affrighted and dismayed.

By: John Leet

My Secret Family aka Sugar Crash is a cult novel about personality and eating disorders, originally written as a short story in 1991 and published as a novel in 1997. The novel went viral in 1997. By 2005 the characters in the book, each represented by a personality disorder, were considered a 'pro-ana' secret language by the media, even though the book has no 'pro-ana' message. The story spread in an unusual fashion because it was originally published, not in book form,...

Suffer to be Beautiful
By Ana
I don't eat bread or chocolate cake,
in dinners and breakfasts I do not partake,
there's cherry plum pudding cooled fresh on the sill,
it may as well sit there – to me it's all swill.
I cannot remember the taste of dessert,
when I climb out my dress my ribs creak and they hurt,
I'm down three sizes to a minus 2,
I need to put cotton in the sides of my shoes.
I cry in my sleep for one last little bite,
a glass of tap water st...

By: Sean Fraser

Notre-Dame-de-Grâce is the first of 17 chapters published in serial form wherein Zoë meets the Ferryman and the Lighthouse-Keeper.

L’Ancien Régime: France, 1913 — Modern vicissitudes in les Belles Époques had ascended in a progressive era which begat the Machine Age. Presidents, Lords, Kings, Courts, Parliaments and Congresses and Leagues were belaboured against the Senses of Reason and Logic as they indulged with the Seven Deadly Vices: Sloth, Jealousy, Greed, Ignorance, Intolerance, Despair and Fear; and, in the intrigues performed, they would be sent forth on that voyage where all are passenger.

By: Sean Fraser

Saint-Étienne is the sixth of 17 chapters published in serial form wherein Zoë went in the département Loire where it was discussed the six spheres—la Terre, l’Enfer, le Purgatoire, le Paradis and les Limbes—that, if one believes la Terre is in the liminality—confluence—of Spheres, Plurality exists; and, all things during those days were done while grand clockworks were begun after Plan XVII was adopted by the French Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre.

Indigenus: France, 1913 — Autochthones and Wights - les Citoyens immortels - in the Three Kingdoms of l’Ancien Régime sought the evanescence of Past returning as Belle Époque wanes with presentiment of the events that would come as Man exults Progress.

By: Dr. Kevin Fischer

An exploration of the vital importance of imagination and experience, as exemplified in the works of William Blake and Jacob Boehme. This paper is based on a lecture given at the Temenos Academy London, and published in the Temenos Academy Review 20 (2017).

Boehme wrote of his works that ‘a Man’s Reason, without the light of God, cannot come into the Ground [of them], it is impossible, let his wit be ever so high and subtle, it apprehends but as it were the Shadow of it in a Glass’.17 As Blake wrote in Jerusalem, when ‘the Reasoning Power in Man’ is ‘separated/From Imagination,’ it encloses ‘itself as in steel, in a Ratio/Of the Things of Memory’.

By: Sean Fraser

Grand Canyon du Verdon is the third of 17 chapters published in serial form wherein Zoë meets the Judge, the Tiger, Guillaume Merle, the Chess Player, the Prostitute, and the Sylphide-Collector; and, passes the twenty arcades of Magia Naturalis.